I was recently invited by KISS 103.3 of Boise, Idaho to spend 4 nights and five days at the Boise Town Square Mall, a sprawling complex that will be very dark, very empty, and very creepy at night. Anyone that\'s played Dead Rising or watches horror movies will tell you that this is the beginning of a bad scenario. The main character of my story, which is me, is going to spend a number of nights in the dark hallways of an expansive and empty mall with four strangers. I don\'t know the details yet, but at some point this story will end with us defending the Plush bean bag store against a hoard of undead creatures with nothing but a chainsaw and 8 bullets in a Beretta. Mark my words.

To help counter-balance the blow of learning that the world will soon end, you might be happy to know that I might win a PS3. See, it works like this: Five contestants go to the mall and set up our camp in the Plush store. There, we are admired by the passing crowds, who prod us like monkeys and feed us bananas to amuse themselves. We in turn make screeching noises and occasionally throw things. Each day, people vote by phone, e-mail, and in person to determine which of the five of us must go. The loser is booted from the store, and the last person standing takes home a brand new PS3.

But there\'s more, and you should know about it. It involves Penny Arcade, Microsoft, Sony, and some sick kids in a hospital. It involves a kick-ass once-in-a-lifetime piece of electronics memorabilia, and a Microsoft fanboy\'s dream come true.

You see, after some thought, we here at GamesFirst have decided that we\'re going to donate the PS3, if I win it, to the Child\'s Play charity run by Penny Arcade. Child\'s Play, based out of the Seattle area, buys toys for sick children in hospitals all across the United States in the name of the gaming community.

But we started thinking, \"The PS3 by itself won\'t raise much money, really. I wonder if there\'s anything we can do to make it more unique.\"

We played with the idea of sending the unit to Sony to have members of the PS3\'s development team sign it, but then we came up with a better idea. We\'d take it to the last people you\'d expect to be anywhere near a PS3, people that might be loathe to touch the system for fear of contamination, and ask them to sign it with their own personal messages to Sony.

We\'d take it, instead, to Microsoft.

So here\'s what we\'re going to do. We\'re going to take the system to CliffyB and Major Nelson, to Bill Gates and J. Allard, to the Halo development team, to as many recognizable players on Microsoft\'s side as we can get, and ask them to throw down a gauntlet for the sake of charity, a gauntlet covered by the scrawled personal notes of the maker\'s rivals on the eve of 2007.

Then we\'ll donate the signed PS3 to Child\'s Play. 100% of the money raised by the auction will go directly to buying toys for sick children, because Child\'s Play doesn\'t take any money out of donations for administrative overhead or anything of the sort. On December 13th, Penny Arcade is holding an auction independent of us to help raise money for Child\'s Play, and we hope to hand them an auction piece that will show up in video game documentaries somewhere down the road.

We\'ve already contacted Penny Arcade and received a positive response and a thumbs up. We\'ve got Microsoft on the phone working to figure out who will sign it if we win.

All we need now is to actually win the PS3.

But in order for all this to happen, you have to vote me in, or at least keep me from being voted out. Gamers can vote by e-mail, by phone, or in person at the Boise mall. This link should have some sort of instructions on how to vote for me, so go there and send an e-mail voting for Aaron Stanton.

You don\'t have to be local to vote via e-mail, and every vote counts.

If all goes well, I\'ll be posting a daily podcast from the inside of the mall, which will be somewhat difficult considering I won\'t be allowed near a computer for more than 30 minutes a day. If all doesn\'t go well, then I won\'t. We\'ll see what happens.

In the mean time, wish me luck, and drop by and say hello if you live in the area.